Certainly the single most important black
artist in rock and roll, Chuck Berry is arguably the most important figure,
regardless of race, in rock history. The archetypal rock and roller, Chuck
Berry melded blues, country, and a witty, defiant teen outlook into songs
that influenced vitally every rock musician in his wake.

Berry achieved a number of firsts:

The first guitarist singer to reach charts.

The first rock and roller to write
words that were relevant and entertaining to his young white audience
with out alienating his core black audience.

First songwriter/performer in 1955.

He achieved all of this with a driving rock
and roll rhythm that was, if not brand new certainly unique enough to be
instantly recognizable. For those reasons he more than any other artist,
is responsible for the direction of popular music.

When performing his material Berry made sure to enunciate clearly, singing
outside the standard blues realm, and he improvised lyrics that caused to
audience to pay closer attention.

"If you tried to give rock and roll
another name, you might call it Chuck Berry"
John Lennon

Berry at age 6

Berry at age 11

Chuck Berry was born October 18, 1926 in San Jose, CA.
While still an infant the Berry family moved to St. Louis, Missouri. His
mother, Martha, was a schoolteacher; his father, Henry, was a contractor
and deacon of the nearby Antioch Baptist Church. The third of six children,
he grew up in The Ville, an area just north of downtown St. Louis which
was one of the few areas in the city where Blacks could own property.
Consequently, during the 1920's and 30's, The Ville became synonymous with
Black prosperity.

photo courtesy City of St. Louis
Antioch Baptist Church

The Ville
photo courtesy City of St. Louis

Chuck sang in his St. Louis church's Baptist choir at age
six. He learned to play the guitar while attending Sumner High School, the
first Black high school west of the Mississippi. Local jazz guitarist
Ira Harris was an early teacher, Berry learned the rudiments of the instrument
on a four-string tenor guitar. By 1950, however, he had changed over
to a six-string electric.

photo courtesy of City of St. Louis
Sumner High School

At Sumner, Berry got his first taste of stardom, singing
Jay McShann's "Confessin' the Blues" in the All Men's Review in 1941; it
was a song he was later to record on the 1960 album Rockin' at the Hops.
But music was not his only focus at that time. When not working with his
father, Berry began to cultivate a lifelong interest in photography through
his uncle Harry Davis.

Before graduating from high school Berry had a number of
run ins with the law. In 1944, on a joy ride to Kansas City, Berry
and two friends were arrested and found guilty of armed robbery; each was
sentenced to 10 years in the Intermediate Reformatory for Young Men at Algoa,
near Jefferson, Missouri. While there Berry joined a gospel group and boxed
briefly before being released on his 21st birthday in 1947.

A year later, Berry married Themetta Suggs and began a
series of jobs: between 1948 and 1955, Berry worked as a janitor at the
Fisher Body auto assembly plant, trained to be a hairdresser at the Poro
School , freelanced as a photographer, assisted his father as a carpenter,
and began his career as a musician. During this time he was playing the
guitar and developing a reputation around St. Louis.

In 1952 Chuck Berry began to play professionally at different
clubs in St. Louis. On New Year's Eve Berry joined the Sir John Trio. The
leader of the group was Johnnie Johnson
and the third person was the drummer Eddie Hardy. The Sir John Trio became
the house band at the Cosmopolitan Club in East St. Louis and would be the
start of Berry's long association with Johnson whose piano boogie
riffs would have a great influence on his guitar playing. Johnson recognizing
that people were coming to see Berry wisely renamed the band The Chuck Berry
Trio.

The most popular music in the area among whites was hillbilly.
The band played mostly blues and ballads, but Berry"s joking "hillbilly"
songs were the real pleasers and it wasn't long before a white crowd got
word of a black hillbilly and began coming to his shows

"Curiosity provoked me to lay a lot of
our country stuff on our predominantly black audience and some of our black
audience began whispering "who is that black hillbilly at the Cosmo?" After
they laughed at me a few times they began requesting the hillbilly stuff
and enjoyed dancing to it."
Chuck Berry, from "Chuck Berry: The Autobiography"

While attending a nightclub in Chicago in 1955, Berry met
his idol Muddy Waters and asked Waters where he might be able to cut a record.
Waters directed him to Leonard Chess of Chess Records

In May, 1955, with an introduction from Waters, Berry went to Chicago to
audition for Leonard Chess
in hopes of landing a recording contract. Berry thought his blues
material would be of most interest to Chess, but to his surprise it was
the hillbilly "Ida Red" that got Chess' attention. Chess, a great blues
label, in recent years had seen its market shrink and was looking to move
beyond the rhythm and blues market and Chess thought Berry might be that
artist that could do it. So on May 21, 1955 Berry recorded, "Ida Red" renamed
"Maybellene," the name taken from a line of cosmetics, with Johnny Johnson,
Jerome Green (from Bo Diddley's band) on the maracas, Jasper Thomas on the
drums and blue legend Willie Dixon on the bass. Johnson's piano playing,
the heavy drums and maracas and Berry's lead style gave Maybellene the hard
rhythm and blues feel that balanced the country elements. Maybellene reached
the pop charts and #1 on the rhythm and blues charts.

To help get airplay Chess gave a copy of the record to
the influential disc jockey Alan Freed.. In return Freed and his associate
Russ Fratto were given two-thirds of the writing credits, something that
Berry was unaware of until the song was released and published. Freed aired
the single for two hours on WINS in New York. The song went on to sell over
a million copies, reaching #1 on Billboard's R & B chart and
#5 on the Hot 100.

Duck Walking

Berry excelled on the stage, especially after his signature
"duck walk"was introduced into his act in New York in 1956. Berry says he
perfected his famous duck walk to hide the wrinkles in a rayon suit at a
1956 performance in New York, "It got an ovation," he recalls,
"so I did it again and again."

With nearly twenty chart hits between 1957 and 1960, Berry
became famous for his examination of the adolescent experience, particularly
on "Rock 'n' Roll Music", "School Day" and "Sweet Little Sixteen". He even
made several big-screen appearances - "Rock Rock Rock", "Mr. Rock'n'Roll"
(both 1957) and "Go Johnny Go" (1959), while his live concert show
was captured on film in "Jazz On A Summer's Day" (1960)

With the money from all this success, he purchased some
30 acres of land in Wentzville MO (about 30 miles west of St. Louis) in
April 1957, and 11 months later, he opened Club Bandstand. The
Club was located at 814 North Grand Avenue between Delmar and Enright; in
the 1910's and 1920's, this was St. Louis' Theater District, home to the
Princess Theater, the St. Louis Theater and the segregated Fox. The area
was also a bastion of white professional culture. Not only did fraternal
organizations such as the Masons and the Scottish Rite build their temples
there, but the area was home to a number of doctor and dentist offices and
the gradually expanding St. Louis University. The appearance of a racially
integrated nightclub owned by a successful black entertainer in such an
area must have been a red flag to the local authorities, and it wasn't long
before the St. Louis police had their chance to close it down, engendering
the scandal that very nearly put an end to Berry's career.

In December 1959 following an appearance in El Paso, Berry
and his band visited nearby Juarez, Mexico. There he invited a fourteen
year old Apache waitress Janice Escalanti from Yuma, Arizona,
to work as a hat check girl at his nightclub Berry's Club Bandstand
in St. Louis. According to Berry, when he refused her advances she left
in a fit of anger. On December 21 Escalanti arrest on a prostitution
charge at a local hotel. This incident would lead to Berry being charged
with violation of the Mann Act.. This federal statue forbid the transporting
a minor across state lines for the purpose of prostitution. Berry was
convicted to five years in prison and fined $5,000. An appeal was made based
on racial comments made by the presiding judge and a new trial began in
October, 1961. Most of the original verdict was upheld and Berry received
three years at the Indiana Federal Prison and fined $10,000. Two months
later he was transferred to Leavenworth Federal Prison in Kansas. He completed
his sentence at the Federal Medical Center in Springfield, Missouri and
was released on his birthday October 18, 1963. Chuck Berry was never the
same again. He felt he had been hounded by the press and betrayed by the
both sides of the legal professional.

Upon has release he resumed recording and touring. From February, 1964 to
March 1965, Chess released six singles, all of which made the top 100. "Nadine",
"No Particular Place To Go", "You Never Can Tell', and "Promised Land",
were all written in the Federal Medical Center in Springfield, MO, and rank
among the very best songs in the Berry catalog. Sadly, the last of these
singles, "Dear Dad", was to be Berry's last chart success for seven years,
heralding another decline in his career.

In 1964 Berry toured Great Britain for the first time and
recorded an album with guitar great Bo Diddley, Two Great Guitars.
He also opened the amusement park Berry Park, near Wentzville, Missouri
in the early sixties.

Berry left Chess in 1966 for Mercury Records. His Mercury albums, including
Live at the Fillmore, recorded with the Steve Miller Blues Band failed to sell,
and he returned to Chess in 1970.
The Chess albums Back Home, San Francisco Dues and Bio
are considered among his finest.

In the late sixties and early seventies Berry was a fixture
at "Rock Revival" shows. It was at one of these shows that unknown to him
"My Ding-A-Ling" was recorded. It's ironic that this silly, smutty sing
along would be Berry's only number one record. Originally recorded
under the title "My Tambourine" on the 1968 Mercury album From St. Louis
to Frisco, it became Berry's best-selling single ever in July of 1972.
The song was wholly owned by Berry's publishing company, Isalee, providing
him the kind of financial reward that far better works never did.

Chuck Berry appeared in the 1973 film Let the Good Times Roll,
compiled from Richard Nader's rock 'n' roll revival
shows, and in 1978 film American Hot Wax, a fictional week in the
life of rock 'n' roll, with disc jockey Alan Freed as its central
character. Berry also toured regularly and appeared on numerous television
shows during the 70s. He reemerged with a new round of touring and his first
album of new material in years, Rock It.

Since the release of Rock It, Berry's career has
been marked by even more controversy. A four month jail term in 1979 for
tax evasion, and a lengthy round of litigation in the early 1990's by a
number of women who accused Berry of videotaping them as they went to the
bathroom at Berry Park and Berry's Wentzville restaurant,
The Southern Air, coupled with numerous erratic live performances,
have added fuel to Berry's reputation of being difficult and unpredictable.

Berry's contribution to rock and roll is enormous and still
being felt, as his 1986 induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and
1987 release his totally self-written autobiography and the following year
Hail! Hail! Rock ' n' Roll have proved.

Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll
was filmed and recorded at a 1986 concert in St. Louis organized by Keith
Richards to celebrate Berry's sixtieth birthday and featuring Richards and
Eric Clapton was released. In 1993 Berry performed at President Bill Clinton's
inaugural.

Unfortunately, Berry didn't think that his records
had any longevity, and he treated them like perishable products. It was
only a matter of time before he dropped
his band (allegedly because of excessive
drinking) and started playing with local pick up bands. His standard procedure
was to have the local promoter make all the arrangements, with different
players in every town to avoid the expense of travelling with a steady band.
More often then not, he would show up at a club or concert hall minutes
before show time, get paid, then meet the band if time allowed. If not he'd
go out on stage, tune his guitar and then tell the band to watch his leg
for clues. The shows were usually disappointing to his fans, and he
has since developed a reputation for being more concerned with saving a
buck or two then pleasing his audience.

Berry was a moody man who burned many bridges in his life
and was never nice to those he did not know well. It should be remembered
that Berry was a victim of prejudices of the time, songwriting credits
were stolen from him ( Freed and a Freed associate Russ Fratto were listed
as a co-writers on Maybellene) and was harassed by the government.

Playing at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

However, in the 1950s he led the way in uniting the white
and black races when it came to music. Berry had a unique talent of
being able to put his thoughts into song form. While most of his songs dealt
with teenage life, Berry also covered a wide range of universal subjects:
love, money, fame, glory, loneliness and rejection.

Berry was inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
in 1986.
Berry was inducted into the Blues Foundation' Hall of Fame in 1985.Chuck BerryChuck Berry